#158: A Quick Peek at What Six-Figure Writers Do Differently

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. Just a reminder that you can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com episode158 and those notes will include a summary of my discussion here, as well as any links to resources I mentioned during the episode. Hey, before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that I still have a couple of spots left in my coaching group for established freelance writers and copywriters. If you're already earning somewhere between 2,000 to $7,000 per month or the part time equivalent to that, we're going to work together to double your income and take more time off. If you'd like to learn more about this, send me an email eddblauncher.com just put the word double in the subject line. That way I know what you're inquiring about and I'll reply to you with the details. So this week's episode is a bit shorter than usual and it's just me here with you today, no guest. And I wanted to share some insights with. While I was thinking about them and in true ready, fire, aim mode, I just basically hit the record button and started firing off with some really basic notes because I've been talking with several coaching clients who have gone on to the six figure level and I've also been talking with a few peers who are already at that level and just basically doing some research for some things I'm thinking about doing later this year. And through those conversations and those email exchanges, some really cool stuff kind of emerged. I started looking at some patterns and I just realized, you know what, this be great info to put out there. And essentially what I'd like to share with you today is just kind of give you a quick peek at what six figure writers do differently from most others who are earning before that. Um, so I just jotted down some notes, I looked at some of the patterns. A lot of this came through some surveys that I did and some of the conversations that I've had with some of these folks, as I mentioned, and there were a few other things, but most of them just kind of fell into these nine buckets. Now before we get into them, I want to just make Something really clear here. This is not about your own personal worth or value, okay? This is simply an income comparison. I think it's always interesting to see these because they contain a lot of insight in ideas in them. And the good news is that there's a good chance that you have a lot of this going for you now. So don't feel that, oh, well, that's them. You know, they have something I don't have. They're better. Not necessarily, I find, and as you'll see here in a few minutes, these are not necessarily intrinsic things that they were born born with. These are things that these writers have developed a lot of. These are practices, attitudes, mindsets, habits, routines and strategies that they have just learned. They've developed many cases. These things didn't come naturally to these folks. They just took the time to find them and to have the discipline and the grit to deploy them. Okay? So please don't feel that I am singling a group out and just, you know, putting them on a pedestal and saying, you know, good luck. These people are better. They're many cases, absolutely not necessarily better writers than others who are earning less. They're not better people, they're just doing better. Okay? So just with that, let's go ahead and get to it. The first thing I noticed is that pretty much everyone I heard back from is very clear on their positioning. And when I talk about positioning, I talk about four key things. They're clear about what they offer, what they do, what kind of work they do. They're not all over the place there. Okay, they're very clear about that. They're also very clear about whom they serve, why they're different, and why these differences would matter to their target market. So what they do, whom they can best serve, why they're different, and why these differences would matter to the target audience. They're not wishy washy about that stuff. They definitely have driven a stake in the ground and been very careful not to fall into this trap of trying to cast too wide at net just in case, you know, the. Yeah, I get it. But you know, I could also serve these people, so I don't want to leave them out just in case, you know. And when you start telling yourself that, that is a very good clue that you might be falling prey to that kind of thinking, which is definitely the wrong kind of thinking. It's counterintuitive. But the wider a net you cast, generally speaking, the harder you're going to. The harder a time you're going to have attracting the better paying clients because it's, you know, you can do more for more people and you don't really stand out. So generally speaking, the more specific you are, the better. I do think though, that it depends on the situation, depends on where you are in your business life cycle. When you're starting out, sometimes it doesn't make sense. In fact, in most cases, it doesn't make sense to be too specific. There's kind of a sweet spot somewhere in the middle where you should start. And then as you progress, you can get narrower and narrower in your targeting. But bottom line is, you know, however these people started, many of them started as true generalists and they have moved to clear more targeted positioning. One more thing before we move away from this one. I have a lot of listeners who, when they hear the word, you know, target, market or niche. I don't like to use the word niche for several reasons, but when they hear that, they think they have to pick an. And that is not the case. Yes, industry is probably the most common way to narrow your focus, but it's not the only way. There are many other ways that are just as viable and could work just as well. So when you hear that, if you consider yourself more of a generalist, I think that's fine. You can be a successful generalist. But you know what you still need to do? You still need to be clear about these things. You still need to define that the audience you can best serve, define them through other attributes. And you need to define what makes you different. And what I see generalists doing is making the mistake of saying, oh, well, you know, I'm a generalist. That doesn't apply to me. I don't need to be clear or any. I don't need to state those things. And you absolutely do. You can stay a generalist, be clear about these things, and do much better. In fact, everything else being equal, you'll do much better than if you don't. Another thing I notice is that most of these successful writers, financially successful writers, are going after markets and clients that solve expensive problems. And this is something that I find really, really interesting. I think this idea of solving an expensive problem is a good way of defining the kinds of clients that you might want to start going after. So when I talk about expensive problems and solving expensive problem, here's what I'm referring to. And maybe this is best stated as a question. Ask yourself, when you look at your clients and when you look at the prospects you're going after, are these clients and prospects solving expensive problems for their Own customers. Now, let me give you some examples just so you can see what I mean. One of my previous clients sold technology that helped their customers, which were construction companies, track and manage their tools and equipment. And when you have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in tools and equipment across multiple job sites and thousands of them disappear or get misplaced every year, that's a problem. Okay, so when you are able to track this stuff better and your employees know that, and you have a system that enables you to do this very, very easily and cost effectively, that's huge. Okay, that. What can that prevent? I mean, what if it saved you $50,000 a year in lost equipment and things that you can't find? That. That's. That's an expensive problem. This company solved a very expensive problem. Another one of my clients helps, and they're not a client anymore, but they help food producers track and trace their product from the farm all the way to their customer's shelf on the store. So in the event of a food safety recall, they're able to help their customers pinpoint the exact product affected. Now let's think about the impact there. Is that an problem? You bet it is. I mean, what's the impact of, you know, having a safety recall, not being able to meet the legal requirements in terms of your ability to track and trace this product? Or what about the impact of, well, I can track and trace it, but I'm not able to pinpoint with great accuracy or great confidence. So let's. Even though I don't think these other products are affected now we have to take everything off the shelf. And now it's coming back to me, and I have to now credit my customers. So what about the ability to track the exact product with a high degree of confidence and limit it to just that? That is a very expensive problem that you help your customers solve. If you're in that situation. And there's tons of examples, I don't want you to think that this is just in tech. It's all over the place. Medical device companies help save lives. Talk about a real expensive problem, right? I mean, and that is the most expensive problem. Financial service companies help their clients save money to live their dreams. Many training companies, as another example, help their clients teach their employees critical skills that can help avoid costly mistakes. So it's really all over the place. You need to do. And you might have to expand your definition of an expensive problem, but you need to look to see, okay, which types of clients, which industries, which target markets are solving expensive problems for their clients. When you look at the ones you've been having trouble getting anything in terms of decent fees from, I guarantee you that 90% or more of the cases, they're not really solving expensive problems for their clients, at least not in the scale that I'm talking about here with these examples. So when picking target markets, when picking the types of prospects you're going to go after, start focusing on organizations that tackle bigger, more expensive problems, as opposed to offering nice to have products and services. Because companies that tackle big, costly problems are way more likely to use marketing copy and marketing content on a regular basis than those that don't. Another interesting pattern that I noticed is that six figure writers look for and develop anchor clients. When I talk about anchor clients, I'm talking about clients that represent a good amount of income for them over a period of time. Now, it could be a different combination of, you know, maybe a lot of recurring work, or it could be several big projects a year. At the end of the day though, it's a big dollar amount and it could be a big percentage of their overall income, of the writer's overall income, which I don't recommend. When clients are going above 30% or so of your income, I strongly recommend diversifying your income as best as possible so you don't depend way too much on a single client. But yeah, these are clients that represent a decent percentage of their income. Again, lots of smaller projects or a mix of projects or several big projects a year. In some cases, it's really about the nature of the work and the recurrence of the work. Many times their clients, their anchor clients are on retainer. Many times these are longer term relationships. Maybe not so much on retainer. Sometimes on retainer, sometimes not. But the point is, you know, that they're with them for a long time. And in many cases, what I also see is that these clients view the writer as a trusted partner, as kind of a member of their team, a very strategic member of their team, because they're not indispensable. I mean, they are indispensable, I should say. They're not easily replaceable. If, if the writer were to leave, it would definitely cause some disruption to the, to the marketing team. Okay, some level of disruption. And that's another great way to kind of measure it. You know, ask yourself, for a lot of my clients, would I be, would it be a real big problem to them if I were to disappear tomorrow? You know, how indispensable am I? I also find that six figure writers, for the most part are much more productive and focused than their lower income counterparts. Look, no one's perfect, okay? But what I find is that most of these writers that I've interviewed, I've worked with, I've surveyed, they're really good about taking control of their day. They don't just kind of wing it throughout the day. They don't just kind of show up in their home office and just go by the seat of their pants and just pick a project to start working on. They're much more careful and deliberate about planning their day, sometimes even hour by hour, and being very careful about how they schedule things. They include buffer time in their days just to make sure because they know, hey, life happens. And sometimes I know in my case, I'm way too optimistic about what it's going to take me to get some things done. Even all the after all these years, even though I know that about myself, I still have to make up for it by just wedging in buffer time. Otherwise I just, I keep punting tasks and projects from one day to the next and it's something I'm constantly working on. These writers also tend to work in focused time increments. Either using my 15 minute focus technique, something I've talked about before and written about in my blog and talked about in my podcast, or they use the pomodoro technique. So they do a series of pomodoros throughout the day. The point is that they're really mindful about their day and taking control over their day and their available time and using it as a. Treating as a non renewable resource it is and being a good steward of that time. They do a good job of keeping track of their work capacity. They have a good handle of that are on that. So these are just. Bottom line is they're really careful, they pay careful attention to their time, they stay focused as best they can and they work on their productivity. Another interesting pattern that I notice with six figure writers is that many of them, whether they define these or not, they set and uphold some kind of standards, some sort of set of standards. I did a podcast on this very topic recently, episode 155 I believe it was. And it was, it was interesting because that had come from a lot of things that I had done, but it was based on this particular trend that I had noticed with a lot of high income writers, they're just really clear about whether they have them written down or not. They're really clear about what they will and will not do. I think it's a healthy thing to have in writing by the way, because it's something you can continue to revisit and make sure that you don't forget. Some of these things don't come up that often, but when they do come up, you want to make sure that you have some sort of framework for making the right decision. So, for instance, you might say, look, there's a few things that I'm not going to do, and there's a few things that I'll always do. In the category of I won't do is these are just examples, by the way. I don't provide free or spec work for any reason. I don't begin work without a 50% deposit from a new client paid up front. I don't write white papers or annual reports. It's just not something I'm going to do. I don't work for ad agencies or marketing firms. I only work for direct clients. I don't answer the phone when it rings. If someone wants to speak with me, they have to schedule a phone appointment. I take every Friday afternoon off, or every Friday off, whatever it is. I think it's a really, really healthy thing. And again, I've seen in some cases where they have this stuff written down, they're really, really clear about it, and others they just know that'd be just kind of an internal thing. And as things happen, if things come up as they are faced with new situations, they kind of refine these standards and they let them guide their decisions. The reason this is so important is, you know, when you don't take time to think through this stuff, I find that you make decisions based mostly on your state of mind at that moment, which can get you in a lot of trouble. Standards keep you grounded. They provide you with really kind of a system. When you think about it, you know, it's a set of rules that you can follow. It's like, well, I don't know how I feel about this. Let me consult my standards. And you let the. You let that system help you make that decision. You let the system decide for you, as opposed to your current state of mind. And it's very easy sometimes when things aren't going well, let's say business is slow to overlook standards and make decisions based on fear, which is a very dangerous thing because that can put you in a situation where suddenly you're hating life, hating what you do, and just being miserable. And obviously, many of us went into business on our own so we could make better decisions and have better work days. I know for me, kind of a really good litmus test Is come Sunday, late afternoon, early evening, how am I feeling about Monday morning? Because I know for years I used to get so depressed on Sundays because the next day was either school when I was a kid or it was a job that I didn't like. And I can honestly say, even to this day, and I still, not every Sunday, but I still ask myself, how do I feel about tomorrow? And 95% of the time I'm really excited that Monday morning's coming up. That when I'm not excited, the 5, 10% when I'm not excited is because I'm having such a good time. Let's say we're out of town or we're on vacation, we're somewhere really, really fun. And I don't want that to end. It's not that I don't want to go to work, it's just that I don't want the leisure time with that particular situation to end. Another interesting trend that kind of came up for me was that six figure writers charge professional level fees. That might seem kind of like an obvious thing, okay. But here's why I mention it. I do talk with it. And I start seeing this with writers who are earning 2, 3, $4,000 a month. In some cases, these people especially, they've come from a world of, let's say blogging, where it's blogging for clients writing blog posts, where it's typically lower paying work. And the mindset many times for these writers is that, oh man, if I could just get a few more of these clients, I'm going to make it up with volume. In other words, I'm going to get to six figures by writing a ton of blog posts for two dozen clients. And what I've discovered is that you, you can't, you can't make it up with volume. You're going to burn out in a hurry. I mean, it might take you a year or two to burn out. I think it's going to take you less, but you're going to burn out. The way to getting to six figures and sustaining that and sustaining it, meaning, hey, this is doable for the long term and it's fun. This is something that I enjoy. You have to start charging professional level fees. It's usually not going to be an overnight thing. It's a gradual thing, but you can't do it by taking on a bunch of low fee projects for a bunch of different clients. Okay? So six figure writers are really good about staying on top of what other successful writers are charging. They're constantly looking for opportunities to raise their fees. It's not always easy. There's sometimes fear involved there. It's totally normal. But they do bump up their fees. They look for ways to earn more and less time. They look for ways to just to improve in that department because they know, look, it's, it's, this is not going to be sustainable if I can't get fees that are going, that are commensurate with, with the level of work that I do. And as a quick aside, by the way, they don't really buy into this whole thing. Oh, you know, artificial intelligence and overseas writers are taking over and this is becoming a real hassle and clients don't want to pay anymore. There's definitely that going on. Okay. But I find that whether they know this consciously or not, what they do realize is that that is kind of a different segment of the market. They're not really playing in that segment. I mean, it's almost like if you owned a high end restaurant, would you be concerned that there's more McDonald's popping up everywhere, more just low cost fast food restaurants being built? I know I wouldn't. Right. Why wouldn't you? Well, I wouldn't be concerned about that because that's a totally different category. Is there room for that? Absolutely. But am I competing directly with that? No. When people come to my restaurant, I'm competing against other high end restaurants and let's face it, take any metro area. The high end restaurants are a very small percentage of the overall restaurant base. It's the same thing here and I think it really helps to think about it that way. So six figure writers don't really get too concerned about these things and what's happening out there in terms of AI or low cost overseas writers, that will always be there, that technology will continue to improve. Will there ever be a day when robots are taking over and we don't need writers at this level anymore? I don't think so. And you know, if and when that happens, you know, I think we're going to be long gone or we would have moved on to something else by then. It's not really going to be something to really worry about anytime I believe in the next couple of decades. And again, I'm referring to the high end level of the market. Here's another interesting trend that I've recognized. Six figure writers are typically, well, you know, most cases they're just great to work with. They're the kind of people their clients love. They have a strong work ethic, they're conscientious they go the extra mile for their clients, they provide great service. In other words, they really care. And a byproduct of this is that they also tend to develop really good relationships with many of their clients and they often become personal friends with some of them. They might get invited to the company's Christmas party, that sort of thing. I think when you start developing those relationships, not with all your clients, but with some of your clients, that's a measure that you're doing a lot of the right things. Now, keep in mind that has nothing to do with personality, okay? I'm not saying you got to be extroverted or introverted. Nothing to do with that. This is really more about really caring at a deeper level than your average service provider out there. And it shows. And clients recognize that. And that is a big reason why they are loyal to those particular writers. Another trend that I found interesting is that six figure writers in most cases are cultivating referrals and word of mouth on a regular basis. It's rare to find a six figure writer who doesn't get referrals throughout the year. Even when they're not purposely trying to cultivate those referrals, even when they don't really have kind of a referral strategy or program in place, it just kind of happens. Some of them ask, some of them ask their clients, their past current clients for referrals. Some of them have a process. I find that in most cases they don't. I think this is a huge missed opportunity for many writers because honestly, this is one of the easiest ways to get clients is by developing and cultivating these referrals in a more mindful fashion, a more deliberate fashion, instead of just waiting for them to kind of happen on their own. But the point is that they do depend on referrals and word of mouth. They've just developed such a good reputation that they just get these referrals throughout the year. The other thing that I noticed, it kind of has to do with this is their client will hire them as they move from one company to the next. Very, very common. You know, you got Bill, who was a company A, moves to company B and calls me, you know, a few weeks after he starts there. And the cool thing about that is I still have company A in many cases as a client, but now I got company B. I love those people. I love clients who move from one client to the next who are very career minded, they're very strategic. Love, love, love those people. Especially when I can keep the original client and now I Have this new client because Bill has moved to company B. And the final trend or pattern that I wanted to highlight is that six figure writers are in most cases really into self and professional improvement. They're continually pushing and challenging themselves. They're looking for better ways to do things. They're always reading, learning. These are lifelong learners. That's one pattern that I always see. They're not afraid to seek information. They never think they know it all. They're very humble in that respect. They're not afraid to seek help. They know they don't have all the answers. And many of them recognize that they're too close to their own problems to see good solutions. They may not always see that, but there comes a point when they're humble enough to say to themselves, you know, I don't know, something's off here. I'm not seeing it. You know, it's, I don't think it's something inherent to me. I think it's something maybe I'm not doing or seeing right now. Maybe it's, it's something I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing. I need a different perspective. I need to go find information, go find someone who can help me, you know, go to talk to a peer who can maybe help me sort this through whatever method that is. They're really good about just looking for answers and not thinking that they have them. All along those lines, they're really good about networking with peers, sharing ideas. I rarely see a six figure writer who's kind of a lone wolf out there. And they don't network with anybody. They don't know anyone else kind of at that level. Usually they know other people. Maybe they're not quite at the same level. They are, but those kinds of people attract similar people. Similar people, meaning people who are earning at that level or successful in their own right. And they're constantly networking and interacting with others and sharing ideas and insights and just asking questions and just. Yeah, it's just inherent in them. They can't help themselves. They're not doing it and forcing themselves to do it. It's something they, they want to do. And I should mention that they're also not afraid of competition. So when they're talking with their peers, many of these are technically their competitors, but they're, they're not, they're, they're not afraid that, you know, this, this person might take some of their business away. They, they truly understand that their biggest value and their biggest differentiator is right between their ears. You know, they're a unique product and there's plenty of business out there and just sharing ideas and being very open and vulnerable with others, especially with their peers, is not really going to negatively impact your business. In fact, quite the opposite. So that's it. These are the patterns that I recently uncovered through this work and reconnecting with a lot of my financially successful peers and coaching clients who have made it to the six figure level. If you are new to the show, I want to invite you to check out my website. I got tons of free resources, tips, insights, strategies and inspiration to earn more and less time doing work you love for better clients. You can check that out@b2b launcher.com the high income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher dot com.